Category Archives: thoughts

Tools liberate your data from apps

Posted on May 22, 2013 by

An app is something that makes it easy for a user to achieve one thing. It’s an appliance. Like a washing machine. On the new ScraperWiki platform we talk a lot about tools. A tool is something you use with materials … Continue reading →

Posted in beta, thoughts | 1 Comment

A sea of data

Posted on April 30, 2013 by

My friend Simon Holgate of Sea Level Research has recently “cursed” me by introducing me to tides and sea-level data. Now I’m hooked. Why are tides interesting? When you’re trying to navigate a super-tanker into San Francisco Bay and you … Continue reading →

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Careers in Computing

Posted on March 22, 2013 by

I realise the whole world isn’t inspired by the same things I am, and that’s fair enough. However, on Wednesday, I had the privilege of being invited to share some of my inspiration with a bunch of teenagers at the … Continue reading →

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Getting SkilledUp

Posted on March 21, 2013 by

Guest Post by SkilledUp‘s Nick Gidwani. ScraperWiki is a revolutionary tool. Not just because it allows you to collect data, but because it allows anyone – including journalists who now must specialize in data – to organize and draw conclusions … Continue reading →

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Combining survey data with scraped data to tell a story

Posted on March 18, 2013 by

Guest post by Dan Armstrong My last three jobs have involved telling stories with survey data.  Since every story requires a conflict, I look for conflicts. For instance, I’ll go to CFOs and ask them if their marketing people are … Continue reading →

Posted in journalism, thoughts | 5 Comments

Glue Logic and Flowable Data

Posted on March 4, 2013 by

Guest post by Tony Hirst As well as being a great tool for scraping and aggregating content from third party sites, Scraperwiki can be used as a transformational “glue logic” tool:  joining together applications that utilise otherwise incompatible data formats. … Continue reading →

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Data Business Models

If it sometimes feels like the data business is full of buzzwords and hipster technical jargon, then that’s probably because it is. But don’t panic! I’ve been at loads of hip and non-hip data talks here and there and, buzzwords … Continue reading →

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Hip Data Terms

Posted on February 26, 2013 by

“Big Data” and “Data Science” tend to be terms whose meaning is defined the moment they are used. They are sometimes meaningful, but their meaning is dependent on context. Through the agendas of many hip and not-so-hip data talks we … Continue reading →

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Enterprise data analysis and visualization

Posted on January 29, 2013 by

The topic for today is a paper[1] by members of the Stanford Visualization Group on interviews with data analysts, entitled “Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study”. This is clearly relevant to us here at ScraperWiki, and thankfully their analysis fits in with … Continue reading →

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So web scraping is easy?

Posted on January 24, 2013 by

Journalists, academics and budding open data hackers often praise ScraperWiki for making web scraping easy. And while it’s true our platform and powerful APIs let you get more done, more easily, the statement still creates some head-scratching at ScraperWiki HQ. … Continue reading →

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